in the little treatise which professes to treat especially of this subject.
A complete classification of the things which we can speak of must include everything that we can think of, and therefore all the world. But the “Ten Categories” of Aristotle cannot fail to strike us as a curious summary of all things in heaven and earth. Attitude and Habit, or Dress, the 9th and 10th “Categories,” are so exclusively human that we are surprised to find them introduced among genera of far wider application. Some critics say that the list is both redundant in one way and deficient in another. They say that it is redundant because the whole thing might be cut down to two heads—Substance and Relation; and deficient because to none of the “Categories” could mental states and feelings be appropriately assigned. However, Aristotle might perhaps have said that they came under Quality, Action, or Passion, as the case might be. In other parts of his works he gives enumerations of the “Categories,” naming 8, 6, or 4, instead of 10. In one place (‘Met.’ VI. iv.) he names the first five “Categories,” with “Motion” added as a sixth. This last would certainly, according to his view, include the various operations of the mind. On the whole, Aristotle does not appear to have laid much stress on his table of “Categories” as containing an exhaustive division of all things. Probably at first this table was the result of a study in language, made at a time when logical and even grammatical distinctions were in their infancy. Aristotle took the idea of a particular man—say Callias—and called this “Substance,” and then tried how many
